Good for John Keller, who called out Governor Patrick today for appointing anti-education anti-MCAS zealot Ruth Kaplan to the state Board of Ed. As Keller points out, tests were a valuable part of the education Patrick received at Milton Academy and Harvard Law. They should be good enough for students at our public high schools as well.
If Patrick wants to add requirements for high school graduation to MCAS so that it is not the only academic requirement, good on him — provided he finds the funds to pay for the additional instruction — but enough education to pass a minimal written examination like MCAS is the least the state owes its students.
Per Keller:
Gov. Deval Patrick was a busy man back in 1993 when the Massachusetts Education Reform Act was debated and signed into law, raking in the dough as a partner at Hill and Barlow. Too busy, perhaps, to fully understand why the law was written to include sweeping new provisions for accountability, including implementation of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and the requirement that students pass that test before they get a high school diploma.
How else to explain his appointment of Brookline School Committee member Ruth Kaplan, an outspoken anti-MCAS activist, to the state Board of Education? Kaplan is a veteran member of the anti-testing crowd that finds concrete assessments like MCAS (here, pick your favorite adjective) onerous, demoralizing, racist, damaging to students’ self-esteem, blah blah blah, etc etc. “MCAS should not be the only criterion for high school graduation,” she says. English translation: it should be abolished, along with as much of the other standardized testing as she can junk without jeapordizing federal and state funding.
…one person from a local School Committee is appointed to the Board of Education. There are something like nine or ten members. Why is it such a bad thing to have diversity of opinion represented? Certainly some memembers of the public think the focus and use of MCAS is wrong. They deserve a voice in the councils of discussion.
Because of years of republican governship, the Board of Ed has really been taken over by the types of people that don’t have the interests of the common man at heart. Almost all of them have backgrounds in charter school programs, not in traditional k-12.
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Putting people on the board that would vigorously disagree with that lot would do a lot of good to shake it up.
does not an MCAS abolishment make.
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My reading of the tea leaves is that Governor Patrick will create a system in which passing the MCAS test is given a certain weight among other items in determining graduation.
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Would that keep him true to his word? I think so.
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This could be Gov. Patrick’s first step in throwing a monkey wrench in the State Borad of Education. You dismantle the board stone by stone to avoid confrontation. As you well know it’s the same ploy as boiling a frog slowly in a pot rather than plunging him into scalding water.
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It was Go. Patrick’s miscalulation that this would slide by unnoticed.
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There is nothing unreasonable in the expectation that children should be well prepared to pass the MCAS. Additionaly children should be made well aware that this expectation awaits them and it should be one of several goals that they should strive for.
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What can you expect from any individual when there are absent any expectations? The answer is nothing? Most human beings require tangible and intangible rewards for their efforts. A high school that means something is one of them.
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The day of preserving self-esteem diploma’s are over. What a disservice we have done to our young people.
thought that this appointment would slip by unnoticed. I received a press release with a banner, all caps headline: “GOVERNOR PATRICK TAPS RUTH KAPLAN FOR BOARD OF EDUCATION.” Not exactly the best way to slide through a stealth appointment.
Exactly. Passing MCAS should be one of several goals that students should strive for. By keeping it as a high-stakes graduation requirement, we make it the only goal that matters.
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The focus on MCAS actually removes from schools the flexibility to work on any other goals, such as creativity, real-world problem solving, project management, conflict resolution, etc.
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To address Charlie’s question below, what Patrick, Sciortino, et. al. seem to be striving for is a balance between assessment and teaching; something that maintains accountability while allowing for the flexibility to prepare students for life after high school.
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Keep the test, use it, along with other measures, to gauge graduation readiness. Get a better picture of what a Massachusetts graduate can and should look like, and don’t assume that they all look exactly alike.
Could be, like the Republican attempts to privatize the public education system. Start with Charter schools, then vouchers. Soon afterwards the push will be on to privatize the school systems. It goes stone by stone, and most people don’t notice the agenda until it’s done. The big bonus for the Republicans is that once the schools are privatized then the teachers unions go away. And we know what big funders of the Democratic Party the Teachers Unions are. So they knock out a big source of Democratic funding while giving their corporate cronies those dollars currently being spent in public education. Stone by stone.
Mass has a problem with No Child Left Behind, in that we have chosen what is broadly acknowledged as the highest standard in the nation for proficiency.
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No Child Left Behind mandates that all schools achieve 100% proficiency by 2014, and those that don’t fall into a bureaucratic and punitive state restructuring intended to address “inadequate” schools.
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The combination of our proficiency standard and the 100% proficiency mandate means something like 90% of our schools will fall into this restructuring plan.
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Only a couple schools across the state even approached the 100% proficient standard as of 2004 data.
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We need a board of ed that doesn’t see a plan that will label about nine out of ten schools across the state as failures to be subjected to a board-of-ed overseen restructuring plan as a favorable development.
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At present, there isn’t a single person on the board representing that opinion, as far as I know.
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I don’t know Ruth Kaplan beyond what’s been presented in the newspaper headlines, but presumably, she will bring a different opinion to the board, one out of eleven voices.
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One of the Boston Herald’s op-ed contributors on education, Ed Moscovitch, one of the architects of the 1993 ed reform funding plan, did an econometric study of Massachusetts likely outcome for No Child Left Behind . Moscovitch’s finding was that, assuming MCAS scores continue to rise, about three out of four schools will fail to make AYP. My finding was more than 99% failed to hit the eventual target as of 2004 test results, and I assume that the low-hanging fruit from MCAS has already been picked, and scores are not likely to rise as fast in the future as the past, so I think more like 9 out of 10.
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It’s time for a reality based accountability metric and a research based restructuring plan.
You are going to whip yourselves into daily tantrums over the course of the next year or two if you think MCAS is a sacred touchstone and that there is no room to improve assessment in American public education.
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There is a really good discussion by four experts in the May 21, 2007 issue of The Nation regarding the upcoming reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. One highlight of the primary article, “Evaluating ‘No Child Left Behind,'” by Linda Darling-Hammond:
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I don’t want to read too much into one Globe article, but it appears that even longtime MCAS supporter David Driscoll is helping to improve the quality of testing by participating in a panel and offering MA as one of the three pilot states for developing a better approach.
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MCAS and NCLB are in play, whether you like it or not. I think it’s wonderful that Ms. Kaplan will be one of the people with a seat at the table as we try to fix an enormously flawed system. I would have expected you to be among the first supporters of vigorous public debate that includes all points of view.
“if you think MCAS is a sacred touchstone and that there is no room to improve assessment in American public education.”
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Luckily, I don’t think that. I’m actually fairly open-minded about MCAS on the merits; I wonder if diluting it is a. consistent with what Patrick has said; and b. takes away standards that really ought to be met by anyone getting an MA diploma. As I said in my post, I don’t know enough yet. In any event, I don’t share Bob’s enthusiasm for Keller’s commentary.
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I’d really like to hear some specifics about what exactly Patrick, Sciortino et al are proposing: What do the assessments look like? Do we merely excuse school or student failure by expanding the criteria, or do we allow for a richer curriculum that encourages in-depth thinking?
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Thanks for the link, anyway. Sounds interesting.
I don’t get John Keller’s stuff out here in the hinterlands of Western Massachusetts. But given the commentary of Ryan and, was it James Madden, who were both in on Education Reform, this comment is ignorant: “Gov. Patrick’s comments, in conjunction with his appointment of Kaplan, are downright chilling to those who remember what the Ed Reform Act was all about.” See the Charley’s thread on Sciortino for some enlightening commentary.
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Keller’s guilty of at least a false dichotomy in thinking there’s either the status quo test or no test. He’s certainly guilty of mischaracterizing MCAS critics view of the test. He certainly assumes everything is hunky dory with the test and the standards movement, which is couched in thinking simple enough for him to get his feeble MSM mind around.
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Is this guy intelligent on other topics? What a jerk!
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Mark
Look at this dumb remark by Keller:
Of course those schools have testing of some form, but that’s not what MCAS is about, and Keller knows it. I highly doubt any of those schools administer one test that, if failed, keeps you from graduating. I had the luck of attending one of the best private high schools in the nation, and we never took a test that was a graduation requirement. You know why? Because that would have caused us to spend less time learning and more time on preparing for that one test.
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The best schools in the nation don’t use high-stakes testing, so neither should our public schools.
Wait a minute,
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Are you trying to suggest students wouldn’t be tested? With the exception of gym, every single class I ever took had some kind of a test – and most of them had the traditional kind. However, even in the rare event that teachers have papers and oral reports, or some sort of portfolio project, instead of a test – are you suggesting it isn’t testing? Pray, Bob, tell.
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Since I make it a habit of disagreeing with pretty much everything that Jon Keller (in all his idiocy) says, I’m not about to stop now. No one’s saying no testing, what should happen is that we follow the spirit of 93’s educational reform and offer varied assessment. Listen to James’s words on the subject. I can assure you, he knows a helluva lot more about it than you or I do – and, I can promise you he knows way more about it than Mr. Keller.
Thanks for saying it, I was about to comment to say something similar. That logic is downright idiotic, and it made me tune out of the rest of Bob’s post before I even read it :/
Mayor Scott Lang of New Bedford wanted some way to grant diplomas other than the MCAS – because in his town, kids drop out out of fear of the MCAS, so I am told. Myself, I have a questioning attitude towards ANYTHING that claims to be one size fits all. Here is an article Scott Lang wrote at the time: http://www.boston.co…
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One quote:
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Mind, Lang was forced to back down. But part of the “bait and switch” aspect of MCAS is shown in another quote from Lang’s article:
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Is there a link between increased drop out rates, MCAS, MCAS failure rates? What is the reality of “accountability” here?
Mayor Scott Lang of New Bedford wanted some way to grant diplomas other than the MCAS – because in his town, kids drop out out of fear of the MCAS…
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That may be part of it, but it may also be that schools are encouraging kids who they believe may not be able to pass MCAS to drop out to inprove their pass rates. As I mentioned here on another thread, that phenomenon was observed in the Houston TX school district, whose superintendent, Rod Paige, was Shrub’s first Secretary of Education during his first term as pResident.
He’s trying to be Fox News. His reports are commentary and no one really understands that. If he were writing in a newspaper he would be in the Opinion section.
His reports are commentary and no one really understands that.
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that Keller’s reports were commentary. He as a “commentarist” needs to intersperse his commentary with assertions of fact before presenting his or her commentary on those assertions, but it has always been my impression that he was hired first and foremost to provide commentary.